Daily Digest 1/8/2020 (News From CES)

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
Table of Contents

News From CES

CES 2020: FTC Chairman Simons Says Facebook, Other Tech Investigations Are Ongoing  |  Read below  |  John Eggerton  |  Multichannel News
CES 2020: FCC Chairman Pai Says 5G Can Help Close Rural Divide  |  Read below  |  John Eggerton  |  Broadcasting&Cable
Tech Giants Defend Privacy Efforts, Promise Improvements  |  Read below  |  Sarah Needleman  |  Wall Street Journal

Broadband/Internet

From Networks to People  |  Read below  |  Jonathan Sallet  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society
The Internet Master Plan  |  Read below  |  Research  |  City of New York
Gigi Sohn Praises New York City's "Thoughtful and Comprehensive" Internet Master Plan  |  Gigi Sohn
US finally prohibits ISPs from charging for routers they don’t provide  |  Read below  |  Jon Brodkin  |  Ars Technica
Dozens Of Towns in Vermont To Hold Meeting To Vote On Forming Broadband Districts  |  Vermont Public Radio
Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle Over .Org  |  Read below  |  Steve Lohr  |  New York Times, Vox

Wireless

Sprint pulls the plug on Virgin Mobile  |  Fierce
T-Mobile posted gain of one million customers in latest quarter as merger with Sprint remains in limbo  |  Wall Street Journal

Platforms

Don’t Tilt Scales Against President Trump, Facebook Executive Warns  |  Read below  |  Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel, Mike Isaac  |  New York Times, Washington Post
Opinion: Hey Google, be more upfront about what opt-in really means  |  USA Today

Journalism

Sen McConnell Backs Bill to Give News Outlets Leverage Over Big Tech  |  Bloomberg

Security

FCC Commissioner Starks Remarks to CTA Government Affairs Council  |  Read below  |  FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks  |  Speech  |  Federal Communications Commission
5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge  |  Read below  |  Lindsay Gorman  |  Op-Ed  |  Atlantic, The
The 2020 election will be the country’s biggest cybersecurity test ever  |  Washington Post
Op-ed -- It is very difficult for Iran to launch cyberattacks that would affect a significant portion of the American population  |  New York Times

Privacy

Tech Giants Defend Privacy Efforts, Promise Improvements  |  Read below  |  Sarah Needleman  |  Wall Street Journal
Editorial -- California’s privacy law was supposed to spur Congress to act. It flubbed instead.  |  Washington Post
Opinion: Hey Google, be more upfront about what opt-in really means  |  USA Today

TV/Radio

Seventy-seven percent of smart TVs owned by US broadband households are now connected to the internet  |  Parks Associates
Rush Limbaugh renews radio show contract in a 'long-term' deal  |  CNN

Elections

Inside the Silicon Valley group that has funneled over $20 million to Democrats  |  Vox

Labor

The Communications Workers of America launches Campaign to Organize Digital Employees  |  Los Angeles Times

Policymakers

Chairman Pai Appoints D'wana Terry to Lead FCC Workplace Diversity Office  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  Federal Communications Commission
Commissioner Starks Announces New Legal Advisor Diane Holland  |  Read below  |  Press Release  |  Federal Communications Commission

Stories From Abroad

US and France Race to Conclude Digital Tax Talks as Tariff Threat Looms  |  New York Times
Today's Top Stories

News From CES

CES 2020: FTC Chairman Simons Says Facebook, Other Tech Investigations Are Ongoing

John Eggerton  |  Multichannel News

Federal Trade Commission Chairman Joseph Simons said that the FTC was still investigating Facebook for antitrust violations, and that the FTC's $5 billion settlement with the company is the thing he is most proud of over the past year. The other was the $170 million settlement with Google/YouTube over kids privacy. Chairman Simons renewed his call for Congress to pass comprehensive privacy legislation, but does not favor a Democrat-backed proposal to create a new, separate, privacy enforcement agency. He said that would be a huge mistake and that the FTC has been enforcing privacy aggressively and creatively and has the experience, expertise and morale to do the job, with some help from Congress. He said that the FTC Act, which is 100 years old, should instead be updated, and that Congress should also clarify that the FTC can recover monetary damages, something a court decision put in some doubt.

CES 2020: FCC Chairman Pai Says 5G Can Help Close Rural Divide

John Eggerton  |  Broadcasting&Cable

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he thought 5G wireless technology could indeed help close the rural digital divide but conceded there were challenges to building out the next-generation technology to wherever it needed to go. In terms of smartphones, Chairman Pai said, 5G might be more a "big city use case," but he saw opportunities beyond urban with fixed wireless, which was why he was bullish on the trial window for the spectrum in the 2.5-gigahertz band. He also pointed to precision agriculture and telemedicine. Asked what Congress could do to help speed 5G, Chairman Pai suggested “more clarity about spectrum policy.” Asked about that 6 GHz band, Chairman Pai suggested that, incumbent recalcitrance aside, the FCC has to "find a way to share this public resource."

Tech Giants Defend Privacy Efforts, Promise Improvements

Sarah Needleman  |  Wall Street Journal

Privacy experts from Facebook and Apple defended the security and use of consumer data on their platforms, though they said greater protections and public education are needed, especially as technology evolves and new laws around it take shape. Speaking at CES, executives from the two tech giants as well as Procter & Gamble Co. and the US Federal Trade Commission sought to emphasize the importance of safeguarding consumers who engage daily with a range of hardware and software products. A commonly cited challenge was figuring out how companies can help consumers easily understand what personal data is being collected, how it is used and protected and ways they can opt out.

Broadband/Internet

From Networks to People

Jonathan Sallet  |  Analysis  |  Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Broadband’s fundamental value doesn’t come from connecting computers to networks; its value comes from connecting people to opportunity, and society to new solutions. When a broadband network is available but a person who wants to use it can’t do so, then the network is less valuable to everyone else who does use it. That's because the he benefits of broadband adoption do not flow only to the people who are new broadband users. Expanding broadband usage can grow the U.S. economy broadly. Expanding broadband usage, furthering civic engagement, can build stronger democratic institutions. Expanding broadband usage, from an individual’s perspective, opens a window on the world, connecting people to people, and people to services that can improve lives. Broadband adoption benefits people in concrete and practical ways. Children can do homework at home. Parents can become more involved in their child’s school. Families can stream educational content. Adults can obtain digital skills training, including improving workforce skills, and create résumés. Americans with disabilities can establish better access to education, employment, health care, and community activities. Recognize that far too many people face practical barriers in using broadband service they want and that is ostensibly available to them. Academic research has established that socioeconomic factors impact broadband usage.

[Jonathan Sallet is a Benton Senior Fellow and author of Broadband for America's Future: A Vision for the 2020s]

The Internet Master Plan

Research  |  City of New York

Today, there is a large digital divide in New York City. The majority of New Yorkers use a mobile connection and a home connection, and they increasingly need both to make full use of the internet. Mobile connectivity is especially critical for people who commute to service jobs or for those with unstable housing, while a connection at home is essential for doing homework or applying for a job. However, 40% of New York City households do not have this level of comprehensive connectivity, which means that 3.4 million residents are excluded, entirely or in part, from digital life. The City of New York envisions an internet for all New Yorkers that is founded upon five principles – equity, performance, affordability, privacy, and choice. These principles will serve as measures for success and as design parameters for the City’s approach to broadband infrastructure and services.

US finally prohibits ISPs from charging for routers they don’t provide

Jon Brodkin  |  Ars Technica

A new US law prohibits broadband and TV providers from charging "rental" fees for equipment that customers have provided themselves. A government spending bill approved by Congress and signed by President Donald Trump in Dec includes new requirements for television and broadband providers. A new "consumer right to accurate equipment charges" prohibits the companies from charging customers for "covered equipment provided by the consumer." Covered equipment is defined as "equipment (such as a router) employed on the premises of a person... to provide [TV service] or to provide fixed broadband Internet access service." The companies may not charge rental or lease fees in cases when "the provider has not provided the equipment to the consumer; or the consumer has returned the equipment to the provider." The new law is an update to the Communications Act and is scheduled to apply six months after passage, which would be June 20. The law gives the Federal Communications Commission an option to extend the deadline by six months if the FCC "finds that good cause exists for such an additional extension." 

Even by the low customer-service standards of the cable and telecom industries, requiring customers to pay a monthly fee for equipment they own is pretty rude. But that's exactly what Frontier Communications does to its customers. Frontier customers who use routers they own themselves must still pay Frontier $10 a month in a "Wi-Fi Router" fee, even if the router they use is fully compatible with the service and requires no additional work on Frontier's part.

Inside the Billion-Dollar Battle Over .Org

Steve Lohr  |  New York Times, Vox

A group of respected internet pioneers and nonprofit leaders is offering an alternative to Ethos Capital’s bid for .org: a nonprofit cooperative corporation. The incorporation papers for the new entity, the Cooperative Corporation of .ORG Registrants, were filed in California. The goal of the group is not only to persuade the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, which oversees internet domain names, to stop the sale. It is also to persuade ICANN to hand it the management of dot-org instead. “This is a better alternative,” said Esther Dyson, who served as the first chair of ICANN, from 1998 to 2000, and is one of seven directors of the new cooperative. “If you’re owned by private equity, your incentive is to make a profit. Our incentive is to serve and protect nonprofits and the public.” 

“There is a common good here that is at risk of being undermined,” said William Woodcock, a director of the cooperative, who is the executive director of the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit that provides internet operational support for domains. The cooperative corporation, which would run dot-org, collect fees and distribute savings back to the nonprofit users, is an “alternative model with a long-term commitment to the open and noncommercial internet,” said Katherine Maher, a director who is the chief executive of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit parent of Wikipedia.

Platforms

Don’t Tilt Scales Against President Trump, Facebook Executive Warns

Kevin Roose, Sheera Frenkel, Mike Isaac  |  New York Times, Washington Post

On Dec. 30, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook’s virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that, as a liberal, he found himself wanting to use the social network’s powerful platform against President Donald Trump. But citing the “Lord of the Rings” franchise and the philosopher John Rawls, Mr. Bosworth said that doing so would eventually backfire. “So what stays my hand? I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to [Galadriel] and she imagines using the power righteously, at first, but knows it will eventually corrupt her. As tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that or we will become that which we fear.” 

Bosworth said he believed Facebook was responsible for Mr. Trump’s 2016 election victory, but not because of Russian interference or the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which millions of Facebook users’ data was leaked to a political strategy firm that worked with the Trump campaign. “He got elected because he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser. Period.” Bosworth said that even though keeping the current policies in place “very well may lead to” Trump’s re-election, it was the right decision.

Security

FCC Commissioner Starks Remarks to CTA Government Affairs Council

FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks  |  Speech  |  Federal Communications Commission

In 2020 and beyond, my principal focus will be ensuring that our communications networks and technologies support security, privacy, and our democratic values. I am optimistic that technological developments, especially 5G standards, will support our efforts to improve network and data security. The rise of big data bestows a corresponding measure of ‘big responsibility’ upon all of us in the room. We must undertake, right now and continuously, the thorough examination of all these new capabilities to decide now how we will ensure that they are all poised to serve a future that creates opportunities instead of reinforcing existing inequalities. A lot could go wrong, and it will be on us to ensure that it doesn’t happen on our watch.

While some algorithmic bias may be corrected through greater transparency and scrutiny, the many Americans without access to technology or broadband may remain vulnerable. As artificial intelligence increasingly determines who sees opportunities for housing, education and employment, people on the wrong side of the digital divide may be rendered effectively invisible without the connected devices and internet speeds needed to be appropriately acknowledged by the data algorithms. Those in data deserts may never hear about the good job or the affordable mortgage, exacerbating growing inequality in this country.  If we work together, I am confident we can build a future that is more advanced, more secure and more prosperous, and more equitable for all. 

5G Is Where China and the West Finally Diverge

Lindsay Gorman  |  Op-Ed  |  Atlantic, The

5G may seem like an unlikely battleground between China and the West. Yet the transition to 5G may mark the point, after decades of Chinese integration into a globalized economy, when Beijing’s interests diverge irreconcilably from those of the United States, the European Union, and their democratic peers. Because of a failure of imagination, Western powers risk capitulating in what has become a critical geopolitical arena. Simply put, neither the American nor the European public seems to view the networks that supply Snapchat clips and Uber cars as anything close to a security threat. Some of the world’s leading telecom-equipment manufacturers, including Huawei and ZTE, are Chinese companies with murky ownership structures and close ties to China’s authoritarian one-party government. Many in the U.S. national-security establishment rightly fear that equipment made by these companies could allow Beijing to siphon off sensitive personal or corporate data. Or it could use well-concealed kill switches to cripple Western telecom systems during an active war. The mere threat of this activity would endow China’s leadership with geopolitical leverage at all times. The United States can work with its European partners to reduce geopolitical dependence on China and protect privacy and human rights in a data-centered age. But that will require Western policymakers and the public alike to conceive of 5G as something more than a consumer issue or a trade issue and devise a shared solution to protect the networks whose importance in our lives will only grow.

[Lindsay Gorman is the fellow for Emerging Technologies at the Alliance for Securing Democracy]

Policymakers

Chairman Pai Appoints D'wana Terry to Lead FCC Workplace Diversity Office

Press Release  |  Federal Communications Commission

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced the appointment of D’wana Terry as acting director of the FCC’s Office of Workplace Diversity. The Office of Workplace Diversity ensures that the FCC provides employment opportunities for all persons regardless of race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability, or sexual orientation. Specifically, the office is charged with taking steps to foster a diverse workforce; promoting and ensuring equal opportunity for all FCC employees and candidates for employment; and developing the Commission’s affirmative employment goals and objectives. Terry has served in numerous senior positions at the FCC since joining the Commission from private practice in 1994. Most recently, she was associate bureau chief of the Wireline Competition Bureau. She has also served as an associate bureau chief and chief of staff in both the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau and the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau – and as acting deputy bureau chief of CGB. She also served as chief of the Wireless Bureau’s Public Safety & Critical Infrastructure Division. She earned her law degree from the University of Virginia Law School and her bachelor’s degree from Lafayette College.

Terry’s appointment follows Larry Hudson’s transition to the FCC’s Office of Communications Business Opportunities. 

Commissioner Starks Announces New Legal Advisor Diane Holland

Press Release  |  Federal Communications Commission

Federal Communications Commissioner Geoffrey Starks announced the appointment of Diane Holland as Legal Advisor covering media and consumer protection issues. Holland was most recently the Senior Advisor for Technology and Telecom at the Washington Bureau of the National Urban League, where she developed strategic advocacy and analysis in support of the organization’s goals to provide economic empowerment, educational opportunities, and the guarantee of civil rights to the underserved in urban communities. She previously served as Vice President, Law and Policy at USTelecom – The Broadband Association, developing policy and advocating on behalf of broadband companies. During her tenure at USTelecom, Holland was appointed to serve as Vice Chair of the FCC’s North American Numbering Council, and was elected to the Federal Communications Bar Association’s Executive Committee. Prior to that, Holland served in various leadership roles at the FCC. As Deputy Associate General Counsel for Administrative Law, she oversaw the legal review of all matters relating to broadband and wireline competition. She also served as Chief of Staff to the General Counsel and held numerous positions in the Wireline Competition Bureau, including Associate Bureau Chief, Chief of Staff, and Division Chief. Holland is a graduate of the University of Maryland, and has a J.D., cum laude, from Howard University School of Law and a Master of Laws (LL.M.) from Georgetown University Law Center.

Submit a Story

Benton (www.benton.org) provides the only free, reliable, and non-partisan daily digest that curates and distributes news related to universal broadband, while connecting communications, democracy, and public interest issues. Posted Monday through Friday, this service provides updates on important industry developments, policy issues, and other related news events. While the summaries are factually accurate, their sometimes informal tone may not always represent the tone of the original articles. Headlines are compiled by Kevin Taglang (headlines AT benton DOT org) and Robbie McBeath (rmcbeath AT benton DOT org) — we welcome your comments.


© Benton Institute for Broadband & Society 2019. Redistribution of this email publication — both internally and externally — is encouraged if it includes this message. For subscribe/unsubscribe info email: headlines AT benton DOT org


Kevin Taglang

Kevin Taglang
Executive Editor, Communications-related Headlines
Benton Institute
for Broadband & Society
727 Chicago Avenue
Evanston, IL 60202
847-328-3049
headlines AT benton DOT org

Share this edition:

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

Benton Institute for Broadband & Society

The Benton Institute for Broadband & Society All Rights Reserved © 2019